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Paul Chaney: Donetsk Syndrome Diagrammatic
Tranzitdisplay,
Prague
16/12/16 - 26/2/17
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photos by Paul Chaney
Donetsk Syndrome Diagrammatic
Paul Chaney’s diagram presents in condensed form that which is difficult
to imagine and not easily collapsed to the human scale. He asks the
question: what is the concrete relationship between the Big Bang and the
contemporary stalemated war in Ukraine? If we radically shift our point
of view and attempt to see the realities of our lives within the context
of the development of matter, and if we accept that the anthropocentric
perception of history is not the master key to understanding seemingly
local conflicts, then we have a chance of truly perceiving ourselves and
our limited capacities as we move beyond the threshold of the
Anthropocene epoch.
The exhibition space has become a laboratory. In the
first part the audience can see an immense diagram, a graphic
visualization of the transformation of matter throughout the deep
history of the universe, and in its second part the author follows and
weaves the complex threads of geological transformations in addressing
their relation to the scaled down socio-economic reality of the human.
The ongoing conflict in the Donbas region is thus contextualized as a
product of the contingent interaction of slow geological processes and
turbulent industrial development. At the end of this schema are
presented, like the nerve endings of a dynamic system, concrete human
beings who live and suffer. The project itself was started in Donetsk at
a time before the military conflict. Due to the escalation of violence,
however, it was cut short before completion. Tranzitdisplay thus becomes
a laboratory of nomadic research which has not been completed. During
the exhibition, Paul Chaney will be working on the part of the diagram
which depicts those nerve endings inhabiting the reality of a lived
present.
Donetsk
The city of Donetsk was founded by John Hughes, a British citizen and
self-taught engineer from MerthyrTydfil, South Wales. Hughes was
commissioned by the Russian Tzar to start a massive ironworks in the
frozen Ukrainian Steppe in 1869, an impetus arising from Russia’s
military failure during the Crimean War (1853-56). The Tzar, realising
that Russia’s technologies of war were far less advanced than those of
his enemies, headhunted Hughes from London’s Millwall Docks where he
owned a foundry specialising in the production of iron fortifications.
Hughes raised the necessary capital in London to form ‘The New Russia
Company’ and construct what quickly became the largest iron works in the
Russian Empire. Hughes’ foundry in Donetsk was not only responsible for
producing all manner of military hardware, but also the iron rails that
soon spanned the Empire, rapidly enabling the belated wide-scale
industrialisation and future military/industrial superpower status of
Russia and subsequently the USSR.
Donetsk was developed upon a uniquely accelerated
military industrial complex that has repeatedly led to its
autodestruction throughout modern history – the city has been at war
five times since 1917 as different forces sought control over its
military/industrial assets. During the Soviet era Donetsk became a
favourite city of Stalin, who regarded it as a pre-existing model for
his program of deculturisation. Since the 1870’s, deterritorialised
workers had been brought from all over Russia and conditioned into the
mythologies of the productive hero worker. This made the population
particularly vulnerable to the Soviet propaganda that followed. The
compound legacy is a deep and lasting identity crisis. This fact has
probably not gone unnoticed by the current Russian administration during
its recent manipulations in the region.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union the heavy industries of the Donbas
region were privatised and Donetsk was subjected to the worst kinds of
corruption, violence, and gang warfare. The 1990’s are known locally as
‘The Donetsk Wars’, with thousands of public executions and gang warfare
incidents fresh in the living memory of the younger generations. Out of
this chaos the Donbas oligarchy arose, who then legitimised their
corrupt and violent medievalist style of ultra-capitalism by forming the
Party of the Regions, placing at their head a former bus mechanic and
gang leader from Donetsk – Victor Yanukovych. The 2014 Ukrainian
‘Revolution of Dignity’ against the corrupt political oligarchy and the
subsequent eruption of war in the Donbas are on some level direct
consequences of a geologic reality.
Diagram
The work itself consists of a series of drawings, historical research
materials, and installation plans describing an attempt to diagrammatise
the sociological, geo-political, and geo-philosophical factors
underlying the dramatic rise of the industrial city of Donetsk and its
repeated rupture into violence. The diagram has two sections, the first
of which aims to describe the city solely as a continuum of materials
formed by stellar nucleosynthesis during the early stages of the
universe’s expansion. Each element necessary for the commercial
production of iron is visually represented; iron, carbon, oxygen,
hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium etc. The founding of the elements, their
reactions with each other during the unfolding formation of the
universe, the formation of the Solar System, the Earth, Earth’s oceans,
formation of the atmosphere and biosphere are described by the way in
which the coloured lines representing each element in the diagram join,
divide and change in proportion to each other. The first section of the
diagram is one hundred and thirty six meters long – each centimeter
represents one million years of time. Human civilization makes its
appearance in the last 0.1mm.
The second section necessarily changes scale and attempts
to position the agency of various human individuals in the context of a
universal geologic contingency, describing the effect historical figures
and political events have had on the rate of extraction of raw materials
from underneath the city. The work simultaneously reveals the complexity
and impoverishment of geo-philosophical analysis – and visualizes an
unimaginable chronos in a way that begins to critique the notion of the
Anthropocene. The work also mounts a challenge within the genre of the
site specific by asking the question – if we accept the concept of
universal contingency, just where does the site end?
Research
Paul Chaney began developing the work with local research partners
during repeated visits to Donetsk between 2012 to 2014. The work was to
be installed in time for the 2015 celebrations planned for the birthday
of John Hughes. The diagram itself was designed for a specific building
on the territory of Izolyatsia in Donetsk. However, Izolyatsia was
occupied in June 2014 by the forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic.
The DPR continue to use the art centre as a training camp, weapons
storage facility, and military prison. The rooms that were set aside for
Donetsk Syndrome
Diagrammatic have been used for torture and executions
without trial – by testimony of recently released prisoners. Research
for the work was abandoned temporarily when the war began. However, the
work quickly took on a specific cadence – the very socio-political
elements that the work was attempting to reveal and speculatively
contextualise were now acting as agents upon the work itself. Donetsk
Syndrome Diagrammatic will probably never be installed in its intended
site, as it has fallen prey to its local conditions and became
‘non-sited’.
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